National Public Radio has leveled with us in offering one reason why it fears unfettered linking. Horror of horrors, what if people criticize NPR on their own sites and use too many NPR links? Why, they might even charge subscription fees. I myself am an NPR booster but relish the prospect of this nightmare unfolding. Gadflies are an essential part of media ecology, particularly when they’re right.
I was curious to see what NPR critics might actually be out there, right or wrong. The possibilities intrigued me. I already knew of media watchers such as ChronWatch. And earlier today I had run across PostWatch‘s reproduction of a piece called Post Op-Eds: Boring, Predictable Playground for the Center and the Right by none other than ex-Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy. Written originally for a pulped-wood version of the Progressive, the McCarthy article didn’t include links to illustrate specifics. Still, given McCarthy’s past prominence at the Post, the piece was bloody fun to read. More than ever, I hoped that bloggers and other Web publishers of all ideological stripes would prevail over Corporate Control Central.
Inspired by PostWatch, which I found through a blog called Ombudsgod, I checked to see if there existed an nprwatch.blogspot.com. No dice. But over in the whois area of VeriSign, I did see NPRwatch.org, which at this point was offering nothing more than an “Under Construction” page. An email address listed in the whois, however, led to the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America–a very, very real site.
From an NPR perspective, CAMERA turned out to be a show of horrors. I found that this site did not focus just on NPR–apparently that would be the job of the related NPRwatch, registered in 2000–but it was a potential linkfest for media skeptics. CAMERA was taking on Time, AP, MSNBC and CNN, not just NPR, and while I was immediately skeptical of some of the claims there (was the partly Jewish Geraldo Rivera really a “Palestinian-ist”?), this organization was entitled to have its say and use links to make its points.
Within CAMERA, I discovered a host of anti-NPR items–for example:
–June 26, 2002: NPR: Palestinians Who Murdered Israeli Mother and Children were “Commandos” (with a deep NPR link included)
–May 3, 2002: CAMERA Calls on NPR to Fire Foreign Editor Loren Jenkins
–January 2, 2002: NPR Distorts Even Its Bias
–December 26, 2001: NPR’s “On the Media” Distorts Interview with CAMERA
–September 26, 2001: Despite Terror Attack, NPR Maintains Blacklist of Leading Terror Expert, Steve Emerson
Quickly touring the above, I did not exactly see any intent to make people think that CAMERA was part of NPR, a risk that the Link Police in the past had mentioned without alluding to CAMERA. Just the opposite, of course. What’s more, if anything, I had a link-related gripe of a kind that NPR might not have understood. I didn’t see enough deep-linking to NPR to back up the points that CAMERA wanted to make. In CAMERA’s place, for purposes of rebuttal if nothing else, I myself would have linked to a page where NPR’s ombudsman discussed the Steve Emerson case and other accuations of bias. Had CAMERA wanted to link, in fact? Might NPR’s old policy of ask-first have inhibited CAMERA? If so, the policy had backfired. Expect your critics to link to you to back up their points, and then they would have a harder time attacking–since the standards of proof would be higher.
Whatever the facts, the CAMERA site has struck me as a textbook example of the need for NPR to do away explicitly with all restrictions on linking by advocacy groups, even implied restrictions. I don’t care how many times NPR assures us that it won’t use its linking policy to scare critics. Do we really want CAMERA and its future NPRwatch.org to rely on NPR’s goodwill to do links? Even now, the revised NPR linking policy states: “We reserve the right to withdraw permission for any link.” That’s hardly a great example for a respected jouralistic organization, lest it have to depend too heavily on the kindness of strangers, who can throw the NPR precedent right back in the network’s face. Requiring permission to link is truly an anti-journalistic mindset–a bit like filing a suit to do away with Times vs. Sullivan. Never mind the anti-link sentiments of certain greedy and clueless publishers. They are businessmen people, not working editors and reporters. By contrast, NPR “is pledged to abide scrupulously by the highest artistic, editorial, and journalistic standards and practices of broadcast programming.”
As it turned out, when I phoned CAMERA Executive Director Andrea Levin about the old and new link policies, she said that she herself didn’t even know of the NPR linking controversy and had not received any letters from lawyers. Just the same, more than ever, I saw the legal risks here, especially since CAMERA told me that NPRwatch.org could indeed be the address of a real site in the future. Like most surfers on the Web, her staffers apparently weren’t bothering to read the terms of service agreement–a good illustration of the risks that linking policies could pose to freedom of expression online. Asked about CAMERA’s attitude toward NPR’s linking policies, she referred me to her group’s associate director–more informed about the Web than she is, I understand–from whom I’m still awaiting a call.
Later this weekend I’m going to do what I should have done earlier. I’ll write a nice polite letter to NPR and ask for a full list of sites with which the network’s lawyers have corresponded about link matters. If I can see copies of the actual letters or email messages, then so much the better (never hurts at least to ask). I’m eager to find out more about the claimed “instances where companies and individuals constructed entire commercial Web
